Germnay Retrieves 60,000 Trophy Newspapers From Russia

About 60,000 so-called trophy newspapers published in the 19th-20th centuries are to be returned from Russia to Germany, reports the Berlin office of the German government press and information department.

After the second world war, "the Red Army's trophy commission", as the statement runs, had them transferred from German libraries to the USSR where they have been kept until recently in the stock of the Russian State Library in Moscow. Among these newspapers are the full files of such German editions as Leipziger Volkszeitung, Allgemeine Zeitung, Hamburgischer Korrespondent and Koeniglich Preussischer Stats-Anzeiger as well as the files of Britain's Daily Telegraph, Argentina's Critica and the English-language version of the newspaper China.

According to the statement, "due to close co-operation, the Russian State Library expressed readiness to pass these newspapers to Germany above the accepted quotas on the exchange of cultural values displaced in the wartime.

Since the newspapers were once "borrowed" from different parts of Germany, they will be first accepted by the Berlin State Library to be then distributed among the libraries of the cities they had belonged before 1945.